Students, Graduates & Working Designers:
Do you need a creative pep-talk?
Lost your design mojo? Not sure if you had the creative special sauce in the first place?
Let’s have a chat.
The creative industries attracts amazing people who care deeply about their work. And every now and again everyone gets the wobbles.
Need a chat with a senior creative to work out what to do next?
Let’s tee up a chat, you can lay out where you’re at and explain your current concerns and what’s happening for you. Some creative problems are universal, some are unique, but all of them matter.
We keep getting asked to help out with these conversations and we love it but it has cost quite a bit of time over the years. So we’re making it part of the business.
We’ll charge you, but we’re pretty sure you’ll get more than the session cost back in value. If money is an issue, there is pay-what-you-can offer available below.
Effective and clear next steps.
Good advice is all well and good, but HOW to do do the next bits? That’s what’s included in every session, we’ll talk with you but at the end you’ll get short, actionable steps on what to do actually do next.
If you need accountability you can book a follow up session but you can do one session and have a clear plan on what to do
Files,
Organised.
Simple, repeatable and fast file naming conventions that work across all your projects. Don’t waste time searching for artwork.
Rock-solid
Templates.
Some studio tasks and output intents are best serviced with rock-solid, smart templating. Saves money, saves time, avoids boredom.
House
Styles.
Teaching your team consistency across the board, with universal keyboard shortcuts, style naming & layer handling.
Data
Migration.
Once we know where the data is, we can help you get it all in one place. No more wondering where that backup drive is.
Adobe
Mastery.
If there’s an Adobe Creative Suite issue (there usually is) there’s a good chance we have a fix or a better way for you.
Sharp
Workflows.
There’s a million ways to get creative work done. But not all workflows are made equal.
Variable
Smarts.
Smart use of variable data gets all sorts of recurring studio jobs done accurately and astonishingly quick.
Marginal
Gains.
Tiny 1% improvements that stack up every single time a job file is opened and worked on.
Smarter
Passwords.
Properly managing passwords, logins and other key client details saves time and reduces operational risk.
360°
Visibility.
Clarify work in progress, and get a better snapshot of what’s next with each and every task currently in studio.
Better
Onboarding.
As we improve and standardise your studio workflow, new hires are going to find it easier to hit the ground running.
Speedy
Scripts.
Simple, bespoke email (or ticket) shells that can be quickly updated with the relevant information and nothing else.
Incredibly
Experienced.
We’ve got experience working at every scale and in most creative roles. This means we get your studio needs.
We get
creatives.
Getting in a purely IT based change consultant is a recipe for disaster. They don’t get creatives. We are creatives too, and we get it.
Super
Practical.
Many of the fixes and workflow tweaks that we suggest are easy to implement. They save time almost immediately.
Respect,
Earned.
We help other advertising studios and design firms and we share our tricks and tips generously because a rising tide floats all boats.
Forever
Curious.
We’re eternally curious and apply that to everything. Why is it like that? How does that work? Can we make it work better?
We Pay
it Forward.
We’ve invested in the design community with hundreds of hours volunteering to make the creative industries better.
Design studio workflow issues eat margin, they make jobs move more slowly than they should, and they choke your studio throughput.
Tell me if this sounds familiar. Things feel messy. Files are all over the place. It takes ages to onboard new creatives as they can’t got their head around your studio workflow.
You’re not alone. Creative folks usually excel at solving other peoples’ problems but paying attention to consistency on file management or any one of the jobs you know you need to do is a “nice to have” but not a “must have”.
We get it. Entropy, deadlines and the general rot of busyness sets in. Before you know it becomes a big task to sort studio basics across your team.
Or, how about this old chestnut: - the client has finally given sign-off but the files aren’t ready to go to print because they were never setup correctly in the first place?
The job of proper artwork setup is a can that is always kicked down the road for the last person to touch the file. And here in the now, it’s taking too long to get it out the door and you’re on hard deadline now…
Busy creatives might grab a placeholder asset or just screenshot some text from an online font foundry (but forget to note the font name) and any number of other little shorcuts to get the first draft out the door.
It was fine for pitch, but it becomes a pressing issue and headache when you need to move into production.
The real kicker is that issues like this tend to have a small but cumulative effect on the overall job efficiency. Each time the can is kicked down the road the job file gets a bit slower to work on. Rounds of changes take longer because of a creative or practical workflow issue that “I didn’t have time to look at today”.